A rule of thumb for firefighters and the “collapse zone” for falling walls is 1.5 times the height of the wall.
That is, if a wall is 30 feet high, when it collapses from loss of structural integrity, such as through a fire, it will cover a distance of approximately 45 feet from the base of the wall, for the length of the wall that collapses.
An explosion would extend the collapse zone, depending on the strength of the explosion.
This should make it quick and easy to deal with this type of scenario, such as a siege or earthquake.
Way back when, I was a volunteer firefighter. My recollection of this rule was wrong, so I’m glad that I googled for the right terminology.
War is a common theme in fantasy and science fiction. In the realm of RPG’s there are various ways that wars play into things.
Wars as a part of the back story/history of the current situation in the campaign. This can be just a quick mention, or be more elaborate depending on the GM.
Wars as part of rumors and news of faraway places the players may not or will never go.
Wars as part of infighting between bad guys. The players may or may not learn of this. If they do learn of it, they may choose to stay out of it, or get involved to make sure the least bad one wins; and then go after the now weakened bad guy.
Wars as something the players are involved in. This can take several forms:
The players elect to join in and help the side they favor.
The players have stirred up the bad guys to the point of war.
This can happen in a way that the players may not know it is coming, and not be available to help.
The players have caused some sort of diplomatic incident and started a war.
Again, the players may not know about this, or they may find themselves in deep trouble if they can’t avert it.
The players decide to go off to where there is a war or fighting they have heard about and get involved on the side of the “good guys”.
The “good guys” may or may not really be “good guys”. This can make for interesting role playing.
Unicorns in D&D are the classic image of unicorns in literature, a horse with a single horn sprouting from its forehead.
Like mythology, in D&D they are magical creatures that are nearly impossible to catch.
Human and elven maids of pure heart can tame them and use them for steeds.
Some have combined the winged horses, pegasi, and unicorns, to come up with flying unicorns. What do you call them, unipegs, pegicorns, or just flying unicorns?
Treasure, gold, silver, gems, jewels, and magic are the goal of the hearty adventurers who dare risk entering a dungeon or other place rumored to have treasure.
One can even find treasure maps in the treasure hoards one finds. These maps lead the way to further adventure.
Treasure can be just a few coins off a slain orc, or a hoard of a dragon.
Adventurers have quite the time because once they get the treasure, they may still have to survive to get to the exit to the dungeon, much like the opening scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Sometimes rival adventurers may let your party risk all the danger, only to take what you have brought forth.
A sandbox in RPG terms is generally a starting area or setting where the adventurers can go in whatever direction they choose and find adventure. As they expand their explorations the DM/GM adds to the fringes of the sandbox.
The simplest example is a town for a home base/safe place to rest, recuperate, sell off loot, and restock for the next adventure. The town is in the middle of a certain amount of terrain, usually what the players could travel in a day or two.
This limits the scope of what the DM has to prepare in advance, yet allows the players to decide what they will do.
This is the opposite of a railroad, where the DM does not give the players a choice in what they do and where they go. This tends to be GM’s that have designed an elaborate scenario and want all their cool work to be seen and appreciated by the players.
The DM of a sandbox style of play will have dungeons and treasures that the players may never find. This is not a bad thing as the DM will have a larger stock of material for the future, or if multiple groups of players are running around the same general area.
The quickest way to describe it is “Make believe with rules and dice.” There are some RPGs that don’t use dice, so they can be described as “Make believe with rules.”
If you ever played Cops & Robbers as children, you know how to play make believe.
RPGs take our ability to pretend to be someone else and give it a context, i.e. fantasy, science fiction, steampunk, etc., and rules.
The rules describe what your character can do and different games have different ways of doing that.
D&D is the best known example. You are a player and you generate a character. You roll dice to determine the character’s strength, intelligence, wisdom, dexterity, constitution, and charisma. Based on the scores for each ability, you can choose different races, human, elf, half-elf, dwarf, gnome, halfling, and half-orc; and different classes: cleric, druid, fighter, paladin, ranger, magic-user, illusionist, thief, assassin, or monk.
You then determine a name and depending on the style of play, you develop a back story, or just start playing.
The level of role playing is up to you. Some people are more comfortable saying what their character does in the third person and do not have a voice to go with it. Others will talk differently and say things in the first person, as if, they were that character, much like in cops and robbers or an actor on stage or screen.
The key to RPGs is having fun. There may be several rule books over hundreds of pages, but if the mechanics of following the rules gets in the way, toss our what isn’t fun. If you are not having fun, then you aren’t doing it right.
I just watched the movie Iron Sky. the premise is that the Nazis retreated to the moon in 1945, and a US mission to the moon in 2018 reveals them.
It was better than I expected. It is a comedy/farce, with the feel of a WWII movie mixed in with a bit of 007, and a dash of the advertising/propaganda business.
It was produced in Finland, Germany, Australia, and New York. It pokes fun at Nazis, America, and the UN. The UN is renamed in the movie to something else, but is a stand in for the UN.
It reveals how the rest of the world views Americans as warmongers, and not much better than the Nazis. Unfortunately, we Americans have let our leaders piss off the rest of the world so much that we need the military we have to keep them at bay.
I won’t delve into the politics further here. As an American, if you can just let the jabs at America pass, you can enjoy this movie.
Quills, short for quils pen, are ink pens made from the feathers of a bird in our world. In the world of fantasy RPGs like D&D, a magic quill is needed for making scrolls that have magic spells. Quills for inscribing these come from magical creatures, like gryphons or pegasi. Some such quills might be collected by elves and then sold for a high fee. Other quills might come from more dangerous creatures that require the creature to be tracked down and slain to collect all its feathers, not just the ones that fall to the ground.
For some DMs, a single feather can be used to scribe a single scroll or a single page in a spell book.
It all depends on how the DM wants things to work in his campaign. Some DMs may not worry about this aspect of it, or it may only be an issue for making scrolls, or only for the most powerful of spells.
